Citizen oversight fizzles in Wyoming gas patch

The Pinedale Anticline gas field is a striking spot to
visit. Even with the West-wide drilling slowdown caused by a recent bottoming out of
natural gas prices, the place was hopping one hot evening last July as I
explored its confusing web of roads during a reporting trip.
Everywhere I looked, there seemed to be another drill rig humming away. Semis
roared past, spitting gravel. Roughnecks in big diesel pickups threw curious
glances my way as I trained a camera on this or that – a pronghorn settled next
to a sign warning of exposure to carcinogenic emissions, the distant Wind River
Range seen through a warren of pipes and valves. The Anticline is public land,
managed by the Bureau of Land Management, but I felt like a trespasser.

This spot is one of the more sensitive areas to undergo such
intensive natural gas development. Back in 2000, when the current activity got
underway, it was renowned in particular for its mule deer herd, since it had some of
the
"best of the best" winter range for the animal. That, Emilene
Ostlind wrote for us last year, was among the reasons that the agency "drafted
a landmark adaptive management plan -- its first for oil and gas -- intended to
help protect deer and other resources as drilling proceeded. In theory, it
would allow managers to ‘learn while doing,’ adapting in response to
on-the-ground impacts."

Part of that adaptive strategy was a citizen advisory committee called the Pinedale Anticline Working Group, or PAWG, "composed
of drillers, ranchers, conservationists and local government officials (that)
would oversee monitoring (of drilling impacts), make recommendations to the BLM and disclose results
to the community." It was, HCN
reporter Rebecca Huntington wrote in 2009, "mindblowing" for local
environmental activist Linda Baker of the Upper Green River Alliance. "I
was so impressed that the BLM really wanted to hear from the community that
would be most affected," Baker told Huntington. But, as Huntington found,
that promise was never borne out: "the working group … hemorrhaged citizen
experts, bogged down in litigation and bureaucratic red tape, and failed to
function for extended periods. Meanwhile, the BLM allowed drilling to continue
full throttle despite declining wildlife and unprecedented air pollution."

And now, it looks as though the PAWG may blink out of
existence altogether. During its last meeting in late October, the group voted
7-3 to cease operations for good and allow its charter to expire in 2014. The
trouble, reports the Sublette Examiner, is that it had
received only three nominations for seven seats that will be open in the coming
year, leaving it without enough members for a quorum.

BLM spokeswoman Shelley Gregory says that given the extensive
work demands of the group and the small population of both rural Sublette
County, where the field is located, and the town of Pinedale, it’s not
surprising that there hasn’t been more interest in participating. She also
acknowledges that some past participants were frustrated by what they perceived
to be a lack of responsiveness by the BLM to the group’s recommendations. "There
was this expectation that the BLM would take these recommendations and accept
them and run with them," Gregory says. "Sometimes the BLM could, and
sometimes it could not.” The agency ended up carrying out working group ideas perhaps 60 percent of the time, she adds, including, for
example, increasing monitoring of sensitive cultural sites and employing a law
enforcement officer to keep an eye on them.

The recent tensions seem to trace back specifically to the
BLM’s 2010 decision to essentially eliminate several task forces that had been
looking at various issues for the PAWG – such as wildlife or air quality on the
Anticline. Gregory says the subgroups were going beyond what the BLM had asked
for or needed, and that in some cases had even violated the Federal Advisory
Committee Act by giving recommendations directly to their BLM liaisons to be
carried out, rather than submitting them first to the PAWG, which is chartered
under the law, for review.

But the subgroups also offered a "very vital citizen
engagement process," says current PAWG member Stephanie Kessler, a
Wilderness Society staffer based in Lander who was involved in them as a member
of the public before being appointed to the working group. Because they were
issue-specific and met more frequently for shorter periods of time, they were
better suited to involve regular people who were taking time to participate
between jobs and other obligations, she says. And once they were gone, "public
attendance cratered. … A lot of people feel that (the PAWG’s) demise was
generated by BLM itself when it eliminated the task forces. … The structural
change kind of emasculated the PAWG," she adds, because without the broader
reach the task groups offered, PAWG members have had a much harder time staying
abreast of the relevant issues at the same level of detail.

Kessler’s was one of the few votes against dissolving the
group – primarily, she says, because there was no indication on the PAWG’s
agenda that it might be voting to scrap itself. "I wanted to err on the
side of plenty of public notice. … The PAWG went out with this little unnoticed
kind of fizzle."

Gregory says that a statewide BLM citizen advisory group –
the relatively new Resource Advisory Council, or RAC – should be able fill the
same role with less redundancy and broader reach than the PAWG, and with better
coordination on issues that cross jurisdictional boundaries, such as air and
water quality, which are difficult to address piecemeal. She also notes that
the BLM still has all sorts of public meetings and opportunities for input on
its Anticline activities. But as both Ostlind and Huntington have pointed out
in, the BLM doesn’t have a great track record of changing course on actual
drilling in response to citizen input or new information, including the
continued precipitous decline of the Anticline’s
once flush mule deer herds.

Linda Baker is dubious that the RAC will be an improvement: It’s “too far removed
from the local issues of the Pinedale Anticline to be of great use for natural
resource issues here." The end result of the PAWG’s demise is that "the
public will have to struggle to understand what is happening in one of the largest gas
fields in the nation," Baker says. "I just think it’s a shame. And
shame on BLM for dissolving what could have been a great example of
public-government cooperation. I’m just so disappointed."

Sarah Gilman is
HCN’s associate editor. Photos all taken by the author on the Pinedale Anticline.

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